Genesis
by HVK
Summary: Alternate Universe story set in my D&D Adventure Time AU; a young fire elemental, destined to become a Fire Princess of the new age, visits a wise hermit to learn about the true history of her land. The hermit tells her of the primordial fire giant Surtur, and his rebirth into someone who can make the choices he never could; the fire elemental girl herself.


I'm preparing to start writing and post fics for an AU I'm tentatively calling the D&D AT AU; a timeline where Ooo as a whole is less post-apocalyptic and more of a high techno-fantasy setting on par with Dungeons and Dragons' Eberron setting, mixing highly varied kingdoms and nations with chaotic ruins itching to be salvaged by hardy adventurers. This will all ultimately tie into elements of my Finn-Thor and Kingdom Crossover stories (Finn is secretly a human incarnation of the mighty Thor, Ooo will inevitably be conquered by an multiversal empire but it's heroes will survive to fight), but is first and foremost it's own setting with the idea of focusing Adventure Time less on post-apocalypse themes and more on tweaking character backstories, playing with various possibilities, and presenting the core characters as a team of heroes before they are rulers or anything else.

Accordingly, inspired by the events of The Cooler, I wrote this story explaining aspects of the Fire Kingdom's origins in this AU, as well as Flame Princess' specific origins. Sort of.

I strongly suggest that you delay reading this if you haven't already seen The Cooler, as it has spoilers for certain elements from that episode, AU or not.

Disclaimer: I do not own Adventure Time or make any monetary profit from this story. This is a work for entertainment purposes only.

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><p><em>There is a crater in Ooo, at the very center of the most ancient parts of what became the Fire Kingdom, perhaps there before the great cataclysm that ended the first true civilization of the world and paved the way for the countless nations and peoples to come afterwards.<em>

_It is a place of vast elemental essence and fiery energies; the last step of a titan of fire, long since passed from the worlds._

_Thirteen years ago._

_That essence is gone._

_From the bottom of the crater, the obsidian and glass melted and blasts away._

_Inside there, motherless, fatherless, a daughter of no one and totally alone._

* * *

><p>For over two thousand years, the world had been frozen, and it had been the Flame King of the Fire Kingdom that had kept the world alive; at his price, at his demands, and at his pleasure.<p>

Few people now had been alive to remember the world unfettered and uncontrolled before the hegemonic control of the fire elementals and all their kin. Some were; some people just lived very long times.

And the ice was melting, had been melting for a very long time. The Fire Kingdom was no longer the crown of the world like it had once been. And it's authority was simply ceasing to be relevant in the world.

A lot of the people in the kingdom couldn't grasp that, and the ones that did were understanding fear of a world that no longer needed them, and resented them.

A young fire elemental girl walked the obsidian plains, flint and glass rounding upwards in almost organic shapes like vast swamps and forests, and her tread was so hot that they were reshaped in her wake. She wore the simple dress of a vagabond, the fabric a magical vegetation that took life from her flames.

She was singular. Like a boy that had fallen from the heavens in thunder two thousand years ago; like a girl born from a union of abomination and human heroine, and like a girl who alone rose from her ooze people with reason and intelligence and ambition. No fires had given her life but that of the Fire Kingdom itself. Some thought her the daughter of the Fire King, but this was not so. Some scattered fire elementals called her sister, in a way that transcended biology, but she was not of their flame. She had no surname.

(Sometimes she thought that she was her own daughter; a cycle turning and transforming for a new age. She wasn't sure what that meant or really understood it. It was an inside truth, not a sensible one.)

All this, she said frankly to the hermit who dwelled at the edge of the Fire Kingdom, whom was known as a sage dispensing truths the Fire King would rather have cast away. Untrustworthy, perhaps, and inclined to mischief, but honest.

The hermit was an old woman, strong and weathered like old teak, which she rather resembled. She was not human or fire elemental; neither machine or organic, not a Cybertronian or giant or quarian or krogan or andalite or any species that had come to the world in the past. Roughly human-sized, broader than she was tall, her features not especially notable in any way. But the flames did not touch her, and she was not burned.

The hermit was not a small woman. But when she stood up to see the young fire elemental face to face, standing to her full height, it was the fire elemental girl that had to look down to meet her eyes.

It was said that the blood of fire giants - the true fire giants, the fire-touched people of tremendous size and power in the realm of Muspelheim where the fire elementals called home - ran in the essence matrices of the fire elementals. This girl seemed likely case for the theory.

The hermit tapped a digitigrade foot to the ground. Her cloak of many colors shimmered beautifully as she shifted to face the taller and younger girl properly; her own dimensions were twisted, perhaps maimed in some long past incident. It didn't seem to hamper her any.

The hermit spoke, her mouth scared terribly; as though her lips had been sewed shut, and she had sliced her face open to speak again. "I am an outrageous liar," she declared. "And that is not true."

The fire elemental tilted her head. Embers flickered down. "I don't understand what that means."

"That's because you're still burdened by sensible thought." The hermit smiled strangely at this. "Cast it off, I say. Sensible only operates to one paradigm. If you can't grasp all that possible avenues, best not to stick to one road. If you don't mind mixing metaphors."

The girl hesitated, put a bit off track by this. It occurred to her that this was the hermit's intent. "...You know everything about how this kingdom used to be. I want to know it too."

"Why?" the hermit poked at an interesting bit of flint that looked a little bit like an obscene gesture.

No point in being coy about it. "Because I'm going to usurp the Fire Kingdom, take down the Fire King, and save this kingdom and it's people before we fail. I want to know our history. Our real history. I... I want to know the truth."

"Huh. You're honest as a, a thing that's really very honest. Sorry. Not so good at pithy comments off the bat."

The hermit started walking around the girl, tapping a thin staff against the ground. (They handed them out to the luminaries of the Hermiting School of Obfuscating Wisdom and Sagacity. As good as a diploma, and it was easier to hit people with it.)

Abruptly, she turned and stared at the girl, right into her eyes. She stared long and hard, into the yellow and glowing heart of her mind-

She saw deeply, and she saw truly.

The hermit was old, and brave, and had seen terrors beyond imagining. She would have thought herself beyond fear.

She took a step back, stifling a cry like someone who had seen a hurricane coming within a few minutes, or realized that the apocalypse timer was about to hit zero.

"Who are you," she said at last to the fire elemental girl. "That does not know your own history?"

"I don't... what?" the girl was taken aback. "I don't have one. I just crawled out of the kingdom's ground. I was born like a firework. I don't get to have history. What's that to do with anything?"

"Hmm." The hermit tapped her staff against the ground. "I'll ask you something, girl. What do you know about the fire giants?"

The girl tilted her head. "The incomprehensibly powerful automatons, or the actual giants? The big people that are like fifteen feet tall and come down here now and then to be tourists and make short jokes at everyone."

"Both, I suppose." The hermit considered, and decided to do it whatever happened. "What do you know about the one and future king of the fire giants? The destructor of Muspelheim? The annihilator of all that is material? He who will burn all existence away forever? He that will end all things, because that is who he is and what he does?

"What do you know," the hermit asked. "About Surtur?"

And the girl shifted suddenly. There was a spark of familiarity in her eyes, her flames glowing brighter... and then it was gone, and her expression confused. She looked, for a moment, like a person who had been told their name when they had forgotten it. She shook her head. "I don't... I've never heard of him."

"You sure? Back when Finn the hero used to walk these lands, he told stories about him. That was before the big ice age and Finn disappeared, too. Hah. Crazy boy, completely crazy. Just like the rest of his people in Ysgard, or so I hear." The hermit winked. "Sometimes the gods slum it. Take on a mortal guise and life." She gave the girl a hard look. "Of course. Other things do the same thing, too."

The hermit began to speak. "Ol' Surtur. They say he was the first fire giant; born of flame and the marks sapients left of the flame, and Muspelheim erupted from the heart of the Elemental Planes of Fire, and there was Surtur standing at the core, screaming for the mortal worlds to burn and end the affront to shaped matter. Some say, maybe fire giants were made before him. Every mortal culture that knew fire has a counterpart in the fire giants somewhere, so where did he come from?

"Big was Surtur; most giants, in their own realms, are as big as mountains, but Surtur was the size of worlds when he was mad or creative. Didn't look too humanoid, just like molten lava and fire in a shape like a living being, but still called himself 'he' and such-like. And he was weird, worse than a lot of elementals outside our realms. They get a little odd, but him." The hermit chuckled. "Oh. He _hated_.

"Surtur thought that he remembered a time before mortals. He thought he remembered a time before things could be cold. He hated shaped matter. He hated mortals stealing the shape of existence with their dreams and calling down the gods to steer the fate of all worlds. He hated mortals making stuff that lasted when all he saw was extinguished. He hated them just because they existed. And, he started hating _everything _that ever was. Surtur, they say, wanted to just make it all stop. Make them all burn. Because he was fire incarnate. The very idea and concept of burning and flames with a face, and a name, and a legend all his own.

"Well, legends don't get to pick what they can do. Surtur figured that, anyway... if a thing like that _can _think. Old Odin, All-Father of the Aesir and Ysgard, he sealed his doom when he looked into fate too often and locked it into place, and Surtur's fate was tied with it. When the time came, Surtur would burn the mortal planes forever, sowing the way for something new to come. Everything would die. Hope would burn. Civilization would burn. All history would burn, all worlds would burn and all that had ever been would be gone. And if Surtur had his way, everything would burn. Forever. Because he hated so much, and hated that he didn't have a choice. Mortals got to choose; he just _was. _He was the biggest giant that ever was, the strongest there would ever be, the concept of fire itself, but he didn't get to choose his own life.

"Now," the hermit continued as the fire elemental girl sat down to listen to the story (Bringing her around the hermit's height). "Old Surtur was fine with this. He just kept hating more and more; hating that his fire giants kept loving the mortal worlds, kept taking husbands and wives among mortal races and sewing mortal races of giants among the world. Hated that Loki the Trickster was lured to the side of the gods by the love of mortals even though he was fated to begin the end of everything. But he watched mortals. Studied them. They told stories about him. And the thing is, if something that deals a lot with mortals tries to understand them... they get a little bit of that freedom themselves.

"Surtur watched them. Saw them love and live, saw them born and die. Saw them make their own trails across history, each as singular as embers and just as brief. Now Surtur didn't understand people. But he did understand fires. And he saw that they were flames that made universes inside themselves, than changed worlds just by being... and then they were out like that. Gone forever.

"Surtur started to think about ending all that. Burning it away. And he found something better to hate, he thought. Surtur began to hate _himself._"

Impossibly, a chill went into the fire elemental's back. "He loved them," she said bleakly. "He loved transient things and he didn't understand was love it."

The hermit stared at her. "And how, do you think, that you know _that?_"

"I... I don't know."

"Mhm. Now, Surtur burned stuff. It was what he did. He burned what he hated; he was doomed to burn the world because it was his destiny, and he burned all that threatened his people, for maybe that was the seeds of him learning what love was. So Surtur left Muspelheim one day, and he did the only thing he thought made sense."

The hermit's voice lowered. "Surtur burned _himself._"

The girl was silent. Her eyes widened with something like... recollection.

Whispering, mesmerized, the fire elemental girl said, "He burned his body, first. He let out the flames and unmade his physical form. Then he burned away his identity; his hates and likes, his thoughts, his mistakes, his every lingering shred of maliciousness, his fears and losses. He burned away his own identity until all that was left were his drives and passions. He burned those too. He cremated himself, and he burned the things you can't burn. His name. His hopes. His dreams. And last of all he burned away his fate, and broke the prophecies of apocalypse."

"Yes," said the hermit. "Yes, he did."

The hermit thought about it, remembering. "Nothing was left of Surtur. Just fire and potential, a sun the size of universes, and it fell away from Muspelheim. A thousand shards of Surtur-that-was broke apart, and changed all the multiverse. And where we stand, on this part of the world, a bit fell on Ooo thousands of years ago, and sank into the very ground. And from it's fiery nature came the first fire elementals of Ooo, born from Surtur's power and urge to live again. But Surtur himself was not dead, and almost thirteen years ago fire giants could still sense his presence, changing and remaking into something new."

Nearly thirteen years ago, the fire elemental girl thought, she had been born.

"Surtur's not dead," the hermit said. She poked the fire elemental girl with the stick. "Where do you think he went?"

"...You can't be serious," the fire elemental girl said, flatly.

* * *

><p>"So, I ask again: <em>who are you that do not know your own history?<em>"

_This question haunts the girl long after she leaves the side of the hermit, and learns what she can._

_She cannot escape the terror of it. The impossibility of it._

_They say that gods walked the planet. She wonders if anyone would tell stories about a monster that became a heroine._

_If she could be one._

_And one day, she meets a pair of traveling girls. They are thousands of years old – a vampiric _thing _that looks a little human, a humanoid ooze monster girl – but they look like teenagers. They seem like the coolest people she's ever met, and they dress like vagabonds and space hobos._

_The younger of the two, Bonnibel, invites her to their camp because they are very bored indeed._

_They ask her what her name is._

_So, she tells them the same story the hermit did. That many eons ago, the essence of the progenitor of fire giants birthed the Fire Kingdom. And thirteen years to the day it crashed and was remade, she crawled out of the crater where it had crashed._

_She tells them the truth._

"_My name is Phoebe."_

_A brief pause._

_But she hates lies. Even lies of omission._

"_My name _was _Surtur."_


End file.
